Abstract Transfer from symbolic media to the real world can be difficult for young children. A sample of 73 toddlers aged 17 to 23 months were read either an electronic book displayed on a touchscreen device or a traditional print book in which a novel object was paired with a novel label. Toddlers in both conditions learned the label within the context of the book. However, only those who read the traditional format book generalized and transferred the label to other contexts. An older group of 28 toddlers aged 24 to 30 months did generalize and transfer from the electronic book. Across ages, those children who primarily used screens to watch prerecorded video at home transferred less from the electronic book than those with more diverse home media experiences.
Researchers examined whether contingent experience using a touch screen increased toddlers’ ability to learn a word from video. One hundred and sixteen children (24–36 months) watched an on-screen actress label an object: (a) without interacting, (b) with instructions to touch anywhere on the screen, or (c) with instructions to touch a specific spot (location of labeled object). The youngest children learned from contingent video in the absence of reciprocal interactions with a live social partn...
A meta-analysis was conducted on the effects of technology-enhanced stories for young children’s literacy development when compared to listening to stories in more traditional settings like storybook reading. A small but significant additional benefit of technology was found for story comprehension (g+ = 0.17) and expressive vocabulary (g+ = 0.20), based on data from 2,147 children in 43 studies. When investigating the different characteristics of technology-enhanced stories, multimedia features...
Last. Peter Gerhardstein(SUNY: State University of New York System)H-Index: 19
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Despite the ubiquity of touchscreen applications and television programs for young children, developmental research suggests that learning in this context is degraded relative to face-to-face interactions. Most previous research has been limited to transfer of learning from videos, making it difficult to isolate the relative perceptual and social influences for transfer difficulty, and has not examined whether the transfer deficit persists across early childhood when task complexity increases. T...
#2Jennifer M. Zosh(PSU: Pennsylvania State University)H-Index: 11
Last. Jordy Kaufman(Swinburne University of Technology)H-Index: 18
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Children are in the midst of a vast, unplanned experiment, surrounded by digital technologies that were not available but 5 years ago. At the apex of this boom is the introduction of applications (“apps”) for tablets and smartphones. However, there is simply not the time, money, or resources available to evaluate each app as it enters the market. Thus, “educational” apps—the number of which, as of January 2015, stood at 80,000 in Apple’s App Store (Apple, 2015)—are largely unregulated and untest...
Abstract Stories presented on phones, tablets and e-readers now offer an alternative to print books. The fundamental challenge has become to specify when and for whom the manner in which children retain information from stories has been changed by electronic storybooks, for better and for worse. We review the effects of digitized presentations of narratives that include oral text as well as multimedia information sources (e.g., animations and other visual and sound effects, background music, hot...
Last. Susan A. Gelman(UM: University of Michigan)H-Index: 93
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Abstract This experiment was designed to clarify the referential status of infants’ newly learned words. We introduced 15- and 17-month-olds to a novel noun, presented in conjunction with pictures of two whisks that differed in color (one purple, one orange). We asked whether infants would extend this newly learned noun to other members of the same kind (other whisks), one differing only in color (a picture of a silver whisk) and another differing in both color and representational medium (a rea...
Last. Patricia A. Ganea(OISE/UT: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education)H-Index: 23
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Abstract The current research examined infants’ ability to generalize information about the nonobvious properties of objects depicted in picture books to their real-world referents. Infants aged 13, 15, and 18 months (N = 135) were shown a series of pictures depicting an adult acting on a novel object to elicit a nonobvious property of that object. Infants were subsequently tested on their extension of the nonobvious property to the real-world object depicted in the book and their generalization...
#2Drew P. Cingel(NU: Northwestern University)H-Index: 10
There is little question that parent–child joint reading is related to a number of positive childhood outcomes, such as vocabulary acquisition and school success. With the growth of tablet computers, parents are now able to read to their children using different platforms. This study used a repeated-measures design with parents and their preschool-aged children to test the difference between reading interactions and child comprehension on two platforms: traditional books and electronic iPad book...
Language learning takes place in the context of social interactions, yet the mechanisms that render social interactions useful for learning language remain unclear. This study focuses on whether social contingency might support word learning. Toddlers aged 24–30 months (N = 36) were exposed to novel verbs in one of three conditions: live interaction training, socially contingent video training over video chat, and noncontingent video training (yoked video). Results suggest that children only lea...
Abstract null null Touchscreen devices are characterized as contingent interactive media because they respond synchronously to touch behaviors. This study examined the quantity of parent-child conversations in which 2-year-olds (24–26 months) and their mothers played a game application on a touchscreen. Both mothers and children talked more often when the touchscreen provided contingency for their touches. Furthermore, the numbers of maternal and child utterances were related when playing with c...
#4Megan Smith(MUN: Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Very young children have unprecedented access to mobile touchscreen devices. Unlike traditional video, these devices enable interactive participation as children engage directly with app content that can be tailored to their interests and skills. Preschoolers older than about three years can use touchscreens to learn new words and concepts, imitate, and solve problems. For younger children, their greater cognitive, fine motor, and attentional immaturities might make this more difficult. To evalu...
During typical childhood interactions with screen-media, two features are prominent. First, input is dominated by audio-visual signals and second, these predominately provide children with ready-ma...
Abstract During typical childhood interactions with screen-media, input is dominated by visual signals, with a likely reduction in haptic, proprioceptive, and fine motor domains. We present the first study to investigate sensorimotor skills in a detailed manner, using a two-year longitudinal design on a sample of 117 preschool children. We measured screen-time and sensorimotor development in a differentiated manner, including measures of fine motor skills (FMS), haptic, proprioceptive, visual-ha...
This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children’s learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies repo...
The study investigates to what degree two different joint media engagement (JME) strategies affect children’s learning from 2D-media. More specifically, we expected an instructed JME strategy to be more effective than a spontaneous, non-instructed, JME strategy. Thirty-five two-year old children saw a short video on a tablet demonstrating memory tasks together with a parent. The parents were randomized into two groups: One (N = 17) were instructed to help their child by describing the actions th...
Last. Rosie Flewitt(MMU: Manchester Metropolitan University)H-Index: 16
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Abstract Numerous studies have documented the benefits of parent-child shared reading of print books, but few studies have examined parent-child reading behaviours with digital personalized books. This lab-based study examined the child language outcomes following shared reading of a personalized digital book by twenty-six British mothers and their 3- to 4-year-old children. The digital book included pages that were individualized to each participating child, with each child’s name, photograph, ...
Little research has examined young children’s reading preference by text type. We examined 37 children reading, evaluated their reading experience, and surveyed parents for at-home reading practice...
Increased fruit and vegetable consumption is important for children’s healthy eating. Although repeated taste exposures are effective in supporting children’s acceptance of healthy foods, more enjoyable interventions that increase children’s familiarity with foods through other sensory modalities can also be helpful. Picture book interventions, which draw on the principles of visual familiarity and social reinforcement, are effective in increasing preschoolers’ acceptance of vegetables. With the...